]]>United States-based major cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced that its professional trading platform Coinbase Pro will launch support for DASH token next week.

According to a Medium post published by Coinbase on Sept. 12, Coinbase Pro will start accepting DASH deposits starting Monday “for at least 12 hours prior to enabling full trading.” The launch of DASH trading, on the other hand, is planned for 9 AM Pacific Standard Time on Sept. 17. The company also noted:

“Once sufficient supply of DASH is established on the platform, trading on the DASH/USD, and DASH/BTC order books will start in phases, beginning with post-only mode and proceeding to full trading should our metrics for a healthy market be met.”

Not a global feature

The firm also added that not everyone will be able to enjoy the new features. According to the announcement, DASH will be available in Coinbase’s supported jurisdictions, with the exception of New York State and the United Kingdom. Additional regions “may be added at a later date.”

The post explains that while DASH is a cryptocurrency optimized for payments with optional speed and privacy features, the trading platform will not support them “at this time.” The exchange also claims that DASH is accepted by over 4,000 merchants worldwide.

As Cointelegraph reported in July, Coinbase Pro also added support for Tezos (XTZ).

]]>26817US Treasury: Non-Compliant Fintechs Won’t Survive the War on Terrorhttps://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/us-treasury-non-compliant-fintechs-wont-survive-the-war-on-terror/
Sat, 14 Sep 2019 12:32:17 +0000https://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/us-treasury-non-compliant-fintechs-wont-survive-the-war-on-terror/United States Treasury undersecretary Sigal Mandelker stated that cryptocurrencies could become “the next frontier” in the war on terrorism. According to a press release published on the U.S. Treasury’s website on Sept. 11, Mandelker made [...]

]]>United States Treasury undersecretary Sigal Mandelker stated that cryptocurrencies could become “the next frontier” in the war on terrorism.

According to a press release published on the U.S. Treasury’s website on Sept. 11, Mandelker made her remarks during the 19th annual international conference on counterterrorism.

Cash is still predominant

While Mandelker admitted that most terrorist organizations still rely on various traditional means of financing such as cash, she also said that she believes crypto could become “the next frontier”:

“Terrorist organizations and their supporters and sympathizers are constantly looking for new ways to raise and transfer funds without detection or tracking by law enforcement. While most terrorist groups still primarily rely on the traditional financial system and cash to transfer funds, without the appropriate strong safeguards cryptocurrencies could become the next frontier.”

Hamas already tried to use Bitcoin

She also noted that in February Palestinian Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist militant organization Hamas asked for Bitcoin (BTC) donations via social media. By March, it is claimed that the two specified addresses received at least $5,000 each. Mandelker added:

“While this may not seem like a lot of money, a FinCEN analysis found remittances linked to terrorism averaged less than $600 per transaction. As we know, the cost of carrying out a terrorist attack can be very low. But the human costs to victims is always extraordinarily high.”

Non-compliant networks won’t survive

According to Mandelker, she recognizes that cryptocurrencies are developments in the field of value transmission that require a “tremendous amount of energy and expertise.” However, she also warned that cryptos may never become compliant if a system capable of preventing illicit finance is not in place, and that now is the moment to put the same technological expertise to work. Mandelker added:

“Absent appropriate safeguards to keep our nations and our communities safe from terrorists, rogue regimes, and others who threaten us, the U.S. will work with governments around the world to make sure that non-compliant networks and fintechs do not survive.”

Congressman is not so sure

The last statement seemingly contradicts the declarations made in July by U.S. congressman Patrick McHenry, who represents North Carolina’s 10th District. McHenry is confident that any attempts to stop Bitcoin are futile:

“The world that Satoshi Nakamoto, author of the Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned, and others are building, is an unstoppable force.”

]]>26815Hodl Hodl Wants You to Clone Its P2P Bitcoin Exchangehttps://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/hodl-hodl-wants-you-to-clone-its-p2p-bitcoin-exchange/
Sat, 14 Sep 2019 12:32:12 +0000https://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/hodl-hodl-wants-you-to-clone-its-p2p-bitcoin-exchange/Hodl Hodl plans to make its software freely available so anyone can launch their own version of the peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange. Announced Saturday at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, the plan is, in part, [...]

]]>Hodl Hodl plans to make its software freely available so anyone can launch their own version of the peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange.

Announced Saturday at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, the plan is, in part, a recognition that Hodl Hodl’s business model is vulnerable to regulatory crackdowns.

“History teaches us that if a government wants to shut you down, it will,” Hodl Hodl CEO Max Keydun told CoinDesk.

Open-sourcing the code for its smart contracts, which Hodl Hodl intends to do sometime next year, is a way to deal with the threat, Keydun said, explaining:

“Let’s imagine, our domain gets blocked — some activist would be able to just take the code from Github, fork it and launch something new.”

Already, people in Africa, Asia and Latin America have reached out to the company, asking about such an opportunity, he said. “Peer-to-peer is something emerging markets, in particular, are interested in.”

Rare breed

Hodl Hodl is a rare animal in the 2019 crypto world: as a matter of principle, it focuses on bitcoin (the only cryptocurrency that the company’s founders trust), it doesn’t do know-your-customer (KYC) checks and it has no plan to start.

Why not? “Because we don’t like three-letter abbreviations,” Hodl Hodl’s CTO, Roman Snitko, joked in a slide for his presentation to the Riga conference.

In all seriousness, Hodl Hodl is averse to holding the sensitive personal information that financial institutions are mandated to collect from customers under global anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations.

“We think KYC/AML does more harm by exposing law-abiding users to fraudsters and criminals,” Snitko told CoinDesk. “The information and documents users upload to exchanges has been stolen many times in the past. It also does very little to prevent actual money laundering and criminals from using those services. They always find ways.”

Yet regulators across the globe are tightening the screws on the industry to identify the parties to transactions. Most notably, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an intergovernmental body, has directed its member countries to make exchanges collect and store information about who their customers trade with.

Winds of change

Hodl Hodl’s founders believe they don’t have to identify customers because the exchange never takes custody of users’ funds.

Rather, it lists offers to buy or sell bitcoin and provides an escrow service in which the seller locks bitcoin in a multi-signature smart contract until the buyer sends fiat. Releasing the bitcoin requires 2 out of 3 signatures, belonging to the buyer, seller, and Hodl Hodl (which steps in as a referee when there’s a dispute).

In the same June guidance, the FATF said even peer-to-peer platforms may be subject to such regulations in cases “where the platform facilitates the exchange.” It’s unclear whether Hodl Hodl’s escrow service counts as “facilitating.”

But the founders see the way the wind is blowing.

“We’re not switching to the open-source model exclusively because of the regulatory pressure,” Snitko told CoinDesk. “In fact, we haven’t experienced any due to the fact that we’re a non-custodial exchange. However, we do foresee regulators becoming more desperate in their attempts to contain the spread of bitcoin and we refuse to be the victims of desperate actions.”

Passing the reins

At some point, Keydun and Snitko might hand management of Hodl Hodl to others so they can focus entirely on supporting and upgrading the code. (The exchange says it has no head office; employees work remotely, serving 10,000 users worldwide.)

“We want to create a community around us, so that at some point we could pass the reins to other people,” Keydun said. There is no timeframe for that yet.

In his Riga presentation, Snitko also announced Hodl Hodl’s intention to open “a bitcoin smart contract app store.”

Another way people can utilize the code is payments for e-commerce, and in the coming months, the team will focus on making the technology plug-and-play, so people who are not proficient coders can easily deploy it in their online store and accept bitcoin.

“We want to launch a platform for bitcoin smart contracts, so that anyone who wants to sell homes online or do [over-the-counter] trades could use it,” Keydun said, adding that it might be a multi-sig with more than three signatures and it can be used for multiple use cases.

Aside from bitcoin-to-fiat trades, Hodl Hodl’s multi-sig escrow is used in a peer-to-peer predictions market when people bet on things like the price of bitcoin or publicly traded stock, sports results and other measurable outcomes. A real estate platform is also in the works, with a launch tentatively scheduled for 2020, Keydun said.

Image of Roman Snitkoon the stage of the Baltic Honeybadger conference by Anna Baydakova for CoinDesk

]]>26813You Can Now Prove a Whole Blockchain With One Math Problem – Reallyhttps://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/you-can-now-prove-a-whole-blockchain-with-one-math-problem-really/
Sat, 14 Sep 2019 12:32:11 +0000https://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/you-can-now-prove-a-whole-blockchain-with-one-math-problem-really/The Electric Coin Company (ECC) says it discovered a new way to scale blockchains with “recursive proof composition,” a proof to verify the entirety of a blockchain in one function. For the ECC and zcash, the [...]

]]>The Electric Coin Company (ECC) says it discovered a new way to scale blockchains with “recursive proof composition,” a proof to verify the entirety of a blockchain in one function. For the ECC and zcash, the new project, Halo, may hold the key to privacy at scale.

A privacy coin based on zero-knowledge proofs, referred to as zk-SNARKs, zcash’s current underlying protocol relies on “trusted setups.” These mathematical parameters were used twice in zcash’s short history: upon its launch in 2016 and first large protocol change, Sapling, in 2018.

Zcash masks transations through zk-SNARKs but the creation of initial parameters remains an issue. By not destroying a transaction’s mathematical foundation – the trusted setup – the holder can produce forged zcash.

Moreover, the elaborate ‘ceremonies‘ the zcash community undergoes to create the trusted setups are expensive and a weak point for the entire system. The reliance on trusted setups with zk-SNARKs was well known even before zcash’s debut in 2016. While other research failed to close the gap, recursive proofs make trusted setups a thing of the past, the ECC claims.

Bowe’s Halo

Speaking with CoinDesk, ECC engineer and Halo inventor Sean Bowe said recursive proof composition is the result of years of labor – by him and others – and months of personal frustration. In fact, he almost gave up three separate times.

Bowe began working for the ECC after his interest in zk-SNARKs was noticed by ECC CEO and zcash co-founder Zooko Wilcox in 2015. After helping launch zcash and its first significant protocol change with Sapling, Bowe moved to full-time research with the company.

Before Halo, Bowe worked on a different zk-SNARK variant, Sonic, requiring only one trusted setup.

For most cypherpunks, that’s one too many.

“People we are also starting to think as far back as 2008, we should be able to have proofs that can verify other proofs, what we call recursive proof composition. This happened in 2014,” Bowe told CoinDesk.

Proofs, proofs and more proofs

In essence, Bowe and Co. discovered a new method of proving the validity of transactions, while masked, by compressing computational data to the bare minimum. As the ECC paper puts it, “proofs that are capable of verifying other instances of themselves.”

Blockchain transaction such as bitcoin and zcash are based on elliptic curves with points on the curve serving as the basis for the public and private keys. The public address can be thought of the curve: we know what the elliptic curve looks like in general. What we do not know is where the private addresses are which reside on the curve.

It is the function of zk-SNARKs to communicate about private addresses and transactions–if an address exists and where it exists on the curve–anonymously.

The secp256k1 elliptic curve, used for bitcoin and ethereum via Hackernoon

Bowe’s work is similar to bulletproofs, another zk-SNARK that requires no trusted setup. “What you should think of when you think of Halo is like recursive bulletproofs,” Bowe said.

From a technical standpoint, bulletproofs rely on the “inner product argument,” which relays certain information about the curves to one another. Unfortunately, the argument is both very expensive and time consuming compared to your typical zk-SNARK verification.

By proving multiple zk-SNARKs with one–a task thought impossible until Bowe’s research–computational energy is pruned to a fraction of the cost.

“People have been thinking of bulletproofs on top of bulletproofs. The problem the bulletproof verifier is extremely expensive because of the inner product argument,” Bowe said. “I don’t use bulletproofs exactly, I use a previous idea bulletproofs are built on.”

In fact, Bowe said recursive proofs mean you can prove the entirety of the bitcoin blockchain in less space than a bitcoin blockhead takes – 80-bytes of data.

The future of zcash

Writing on Twitter, Wilcox said his company is currently studying the Halo implementation as a Layer 1 solution on zcash.

Layer 1 solutions are implementations into the codebase constituting a blockchain. Most scaling solutions, like bitcoin’s Lightning Network, are Layer 2 solutions built on top of a blockchain’s state. The ECC’s interest in turning Halo into a Layer 1 solution speaks to the originality of the discovery as it will reside next to code copied from bitcoin’s creator himself, Satoshi Nakamoto.

ECC is exploring the use of Halo for Zcash to both eliminate trusted setup and to scale Zcash at Layer 1 using nested proof composition.

Since the early days of privacy coins, scaling has been a contentious issue: with so much data needed to mask transactions, how do you grow a global network?

Bowe and the ECC claim recursive proofs solve this dilemma: with only one proof needed to verify an entire blockchain, data concerns could be a thing of the past:

“Privacy and scalability are two different concepts, but they come together nicely here. About 5 years ago, academics were working on recursive snarks, a proof that could verify itself or another proof [and even] verify multiple proofs. So, what [recursive proof composition] means is you only need one proof to verify an entire blockchain.”

To be sure, this isn’t sophomore-level algebra: Bowe told CoinDesk the proof alone took close to nine months of glueing various pieces together.

A new way to node

A further implication of recursive proofs is the amount of data stored on the blockchain. Since the entire ledger can be verified in one function, onboarding new nodes will be easier than ever, Bowe said.

“You’re going to see blockchains that have much higher capacity because you don’t have to communicate the entire history in one. The state chain still needs to be seen. But if you want to entire the network you don’t need to download the entire blockchain.”

While state chains still need to be monitored for basic transaction verification, syncing the entire history of a blockchain–over 400 GB and 200 GB for ethereum and bitcoin respectively–becomes a redundancy.

For zcash, Halo means easier hard forks. Without trusted setups, ECC research claims, “proofs of state changes need only reference the latest proof, allowing old history to be discarded forever.”

When asked where his discovery ranks with other advancements, Bowe spoke on its practicality:

“Where does this stand in the grand scheme of things in cryptocurrency? It’s a cryptographic tool to compress computation… and scale protocols.”

]]>26811BlockFi Clients Can Now Start Earning Interest On Any Amount of Crypto – Cointelegraphhttps://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/blockfi-clients-can-now-start-earning-interest-on-any-amount-of-crypto-cointelegraph/
Sat, 14 Sep 2019 12:32:07 +0000https://www.bitcoinandethereum.com/blockfi-clients-can-now-start-earning-interest-on-any-amount-of-crypto-cointelegraph/Clients of BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lending company, will now be able to start earning interest on any amount of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Gemini Dollar (GUSD). No minimum deposit to earn interest On Sept. [...]

]]>Clients of BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lending company, will now be able to start earning interest on any amount of Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Gemini Dollar (GUSD).

No minimum deposit to earn interest

On Sept. 13, the New York-based cryptocurrency lending company, BlockFi, announced that, starting today, its BlockFi Interest Account (BIA) clients will not be required to meet a minimum deposit amount in order for them to earn interest on their Bitcoin, Ether, or GUSD balances.

Zac Prince, founder and CEO at BlockFi stated that he is excited to see the growth in platform activity from crypto investors leveraging their wealth management products, while the BlockFi team added that the decision to waive the minimum deposit will make its BIA available to a wider crypto audience.

This year the American cryptocurrency lender expanded its services into India and now plans to enter Latin America. Co-founder and VP of operations, Flori Marquez said:

“Earlier this year, we expanded into new markets such as India. By making BIA open to all, we plan to target clients in Latin America, where banking services and credit reporting are limited. U.S.-grade financial products have typically only been available to high net worth individuals in countries like Argentina and Costa Rica. BlockFi’s platform leverages blockchain rails to make wealth management products available on a much broader scale.”

BlockFi secures $18.3 million

Cointelegraph recently reported that BlockFi had secured $18.3 million in a funding round led by Valar Ventures, one of three venture funds co-founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. BlockFi was the first company to receive institutional funding for crypto-based loans in United States dollars, in the form of a $50 million lending facility from Galaxy Digital.

In April, Cointelegraph wrote that BlockFi had over $53 million in client crypto assets under management.